Edna+Vargo


 * SUMMARY: Edna Vargo, age 22, died January 23, 1929 after an abortion perpetrated in Chicago, allegedly by Katherine Bajda.**

Chicago was such an abortion-friendly environment during the days before legalization that one abortionist, Lucy Hagenow, fled to Chicago to avoid prosecution after a string of abortion deaths connected to her in San Francisco. Though she was linked to over a dozen deaths, she spent little time in prison and would quickly pick up her instruments again when released. She said, in a jailhouse interview while awaiting one trial, the city abortionists greased the wheels for their freedom with lots of cash doled out strategically.

As was the case nationwide before legalization, the majority of Chicago's illegal abortionists were midwives or physicians, though there were the occasional lay abortionists such as Katherine Bajda, identified as a homemaker in the Homicide in Chicago Interactive Database. Despite not being a medical professional, Bajda benefited from Chicago's catch-and-release system of dealing with deadly abortionists.

On January 23, 1929, 22-year-old Edna Vargo died in Chicago from an abortion performed that day, Bajda was held by the Coroner on February 14. On March 15, she was indicted for felony murder in Edna's death. Three days later, while free to ply her trade, Bajda got caught with 25-year-old abortion patient Violet Diancalana dead in her home.

Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see [|Abortion in the 1920s].

For more on pre-legalization abortion, see [|The Bad Old Days of Abortion]



Source:


 * Homicide in Chicago Interactive

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